A story torn from the pages of recent history touched all those involved.

IT'S a strange sensation, driving past Queensland cane fields, through
the gates of the Horizon Shores caravan park and the Rudy Maas Marina, and
straight into the Timorese village of Nunura. In the sprawling suburb of
Steiglitz, amid the waterways at the northern end of the Gold Coast,
production designer Nick McCallum and his team of 15 have created a
remarkably convincing fictional township. The scattering of buildings
includes an open-air market, a bakery, a few shops, a church and a walled
United Nations compound. The village looks so authentic that some of the
Timorese cast members working on the mini-series Answered by Fire burst into
tears on encountering it for the first time.

Nunura is the primary setting for the two-part drama. It is an $8 million
Australian-Canadian co-production that deals with the tumult in East Timor
leading up to the 1999 referendum on independence from Indonesia and the
subsequent bloody campaign of violence instigated to terrorise the
population. It's through the events that occur in Nunura that writers
Barbara Samuels and Katherine Thomson have chosen to tell a complex story
about the recent past. Through their fiction, they propose a view of Timor's
broader history.

On a cold day in July last year, halfway through the eight-week shoot,
the weather is making a mockery of Queensland travel promotions. Far from
being beautiful or perfect, it's cold, wet and windy as director Jessica
Hobbs moves through the mud to choreograph a scene in the UN compound
involving the frantic efforts of the foreign civilian police and their local
aides to protect the ballot boxes. There are fears that members of the
militia sympathetic to the Indonesians will try to steal them.

David Wenham is at the heart of the action, playing Mark Waldman, an
Australian policeman who has volunteered for the UN mission that is
overseeing the referendum process. A senior officer, he's organising his
troops, one of whom is rookie Canadian Julie Fortin (Isabelle Blais). Among
the locals helping them are interpreter Ismenio Soares (Alex Tilman) and his
sister Madalena (Fatima Almeida).

The Soares family represents the experiences of many Timorese. Ismenio,
English speaking and university educated, is suspicious of the foreigners
and sceptical about their usefulness as protectors of the population. His
sister has taken up her dead mother's cause, secretly stealing away into the
hills to provide assistance to the Fretilin forces fighting the Indonesian
occupation. Their father, Joao (Felisberto Araujo, who is Fatima Almeida's
real-life father), a respected village elder, is covertly campaigning for
the locals to register to vote in the referendum. Meanwhile, their cousin,
Sico (Jose De Costa), a member of the menacing militia, is fiercely
pro-Indonesia.

Answered by Fire

"It's a microcosm story rather than the big picture of the struggle for
independence," says executive producer Roger Simpson. Answered by Fire is
the final project for Simpson and his long-time producing partner, Roger Le
Mesurier, a pair affectionately known throughout the industry as "the
Rogers". Simpson says that while an $8 million budget might be considered
substantial, it's stretched when "you're recreating the events that we're
recreating: UN compounds, the burning of Dili, various massacres and armies
and militias going back and forth. It's a big story." The limitations of the
budget are apparent when producer Andrew Walker notes that a choice had to
be made between roosters or geese wandering in Nunura as the animals
required separate wranglers and the budget couldn't accommodate both. The
roosters won.

While the experiences of the Soares family form a major part of the
drama, an additional focus is on the Westerners sent to Timor as part of the
UN force, unarmed and sometimes with scant understanding of the complex and
volatile situation that they would encounter.

Mark Waldman is a proficient and pragmatic policeman who discovers that
the demands of this assignment are beyond his expectations. "He's confident,
he's strong-willed, he's experienced in what he does," says Wenham. "East
Timor isn't his first overseas mission and he thinks it's going to be
simpler and more straightforward than it turns out to be. They're walking on
a razor's edge the whole time.

"The great journey for Mark is that, for the first time in his life, he
experiences failure because he can't achieve what he wants to do. He's
frustrated by the organisation that he works with, he's frustrated by the
fact that he can't help people that he's come to know and feel for. And when
they're forced to evacuate and sent back to Australia, he's racked with
guilt."

By contrast, Julie is a relatively green but keen recruit. The situation
she encounters challenges her sense of certainty about the world. To a
degree, the pair represent the well-meaning but sometimes clueless
Westerners who discover to their dismay that they're out of their depth.

Canadian writer Barbara Samuels, who originated the project, says it was
vital for her and Australian co-writer Katherine Thomson (author of the play
Mavis Goes to Timor) that this not be a tale of a couple of Westerners
finding romance in some exotic foreign trouble spot. "We didn't want the
foreground to be about two white people who find love amidst a background in
flames," she says.

As well as using David Savage's book Dancing with the Devil as source
material, the writers spent two weeks in Timor talking to people about their
experiences. The ABC's head of drama, Scott Meek, says that the work that
emerged has "two stories that are simultaneous.

"One is from the Australian perspective, the story of the ordinary
policeman who goes to help the UN with the referendum and discovers that the
world is not entirely the shape he thought it was, that its hierarchies
don't always function in the way that he thought they did, and that it's a
much bigger, scarier place than he ever imagined. And it's the story of a
young Canadian policewoman who is even more naive about the world but, in a
strange sense, may turn out to be an even stronger person than he is.

"The other story is about a people's right to self-determination, of the
Timorese believing they had a right to the referendum, believing they had a
right to vote in it and a right not to be killed for doing so. And the
consequences of that belief, both bad and good."

Describing the project as a labour of love, Meek says: "It's not just
about the story, it's about three cultures working together to tell the
story. If you were looking for a model of what two not-particularly-wealthy
public broadcasters can do together, it's here: a story that happened in the
real world in which Canadians participated and Australians participated, a
story that has meaning in both places."

According to the Rogers, the co-production had a 70:30 ratio - 70 per
cent of the money came from Australia and 30 per cent from Canada.
Creatively, it was also split: a writer from each country, lead actors from
each country, an Australian director, production designer and director of
photography, a Canadian composer and editor.

The legislation governing co-productions required that the Australian
participants were residents, which affected the selection of the Timorese
cast. Hobbs and casting agents Lynne Ruthven and Alex Francis conducted
casting calls around the country. "We organised meetings through any East
Timorese association we could find," the director recalls. "We met people at
barbecues, in homes and churches, and we put them on camera. We looked at
350 people and I made notes on every person and who they might play.

"Then we went around the country again with a bag of lights and a camera
and set up workshops. We asked people to bring a personal object, something
that was important to them or to a story about themselves, then we'd film
some scenes with them." Nine were chosen for the featured roles.

None of the Timorese had any acting experience, although Hobbs and Wenham
agree that they displayed an impressive natural ability. "You'd never know
that those people had never acted before," says Wenham. "All of them were
determined to be involved in the series and determined that the story should
be as accurate as possible so people could see what their history has been
like."

Hobbs found that she had an on-set barometer for how well scenes were
playing: "If a scene was working, they'd laugh or react, and if it wasn't
working, they wouldn't do anything. I had a very honest audience right on
the set." She adds: "I learned a huge amount from working with them. It
pushes you a lot more. With non-actors, you can't make assumptions, you
can't gloss over things. They'll say, 'Hang on, I don't understand.' It
makes you much clearer about your storytelling because you have to go with
them every story beat, you have to explain that 'this is what we're trying
to tell the audience', so they understand what it is they need to convey. I
talked to them a lot about what the camera was doing, so they felt included
in that process, and they responded to that really well."

Beyond the drama, the reality was that many of the Timorese had witnessed
or been directly involved in the often horrific events being recreated. Many
had lost family members, some had been victims of torture.

Meek recalls: "When the Timorese people joined the production, a truly
wonderful thing happened. They were so emotionally invested in the telling
of the story, and the necessity of getting it right for the other people of
their culture that they completely infected the Australian and Canadian cast
and crew with a kind of inspiration that they were doing something that
really meant something."

Mindful as they were of the need for authenticity and historical
accuracy, the creators of the drama were also keen to produce an engrossing
story. "But, if you want to tell a story that has political or social motif,
you can't lecture people," says Samuels. "You have to create compelling
characters so that the audience can see it through their eyes, not through
somebody telling you what's right and what's wrong and giving dialogue to
people that explains the political situation."

For her part, Hobbs says: "You don't want it to just be worthy. You want
it to engage people to the point where they think 'Oh God, it's
extraordinary what happened to those people and I hope it never happens
again.' That's what the job of it is."

Come Sunday night, Australians will get to see the results of this
cross-cultural collaboration and a story torn from the pages of bloody
recent history. Whatever the ratings show, there can be no doubting the
passion and sense of commitment that many of the people working on Answered
by Fire felt for telling this story. As Meeks says, "It wasn't just like
working on any old piece of television".